I dont think anybody really expected Officer Darren Wilson to be indicted. And frankly, I have no idea if the particular confrontation between Brown and Wilson warrants such a charge. The bigger problem here has always been the utter and complete lack of trust between the Ferguson community and the Ferguson police department. And that lack of trust is embedded in the recent history of North St. Louis County, a classic white flight inner suburban ring where white public officials still serve communities that they abandoned decades ago. We saw the same thing in Newark and Detroit in 1967, Philly under Rizzo in the 1970s, and LA in 1990. But there is an answer to this and its a peaceful one: organization and voting. The city council, which has authority over the police department, is elected because the majority of Ferguson citizens have not voted in recent years. There are many reasons for this, but they can be overcome with effective local organization. Local elections are the most important elections in America. The answer is for people who actually represent Ferguson in 2014 - not Ferguson in 1984 - to run for local elections there, campaign heavily in the Ferguson community, and when they win election, to clean house in the broken police (and other civil service) departments in Ferguson. That wont solve all the problems there, but it will go a long way toward giving the citizens of Ferguson control over the people ostensibly there to protect them, than the status quo, where the people who run the town do not answer to the people who live there.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 02:53:46 +0000